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Divine Shadow Season 1: Justice. ZAC'S HAUNTED HOUSE - DENNIS COOPER. Dennis Cooper’s tenth novel bears all of the earmarks of his legendary and controversial work — intricate formal and stylistic play, disturbing content, an exploration of the borderline between fantasy and reality, concern for the emotions and dilemmas of youth, etc. — but it is both something unique in his body of writing and possibly something of a world’s first in the novel genre itself.

Instead of gathering materials from language, sentences, and the developmental character and narrative possibilities allowed and restricted by written fiction, Cooper has turned his characteristic inventiveness on the animated gif, employing gifs’ tightly wound, looping visual possibilities, nervous rhythms, tiny storylines, and their status as dismembered, twitching eye candy to compose a short novel of unexpected complexity, strangeness, poetry, and comedy. AVAILABLE NOW AS A FREE DOWNLOAD OR TO VIEW ONLINE HERE:www.kiddiepunk.com/zacshauntedhouse Praise for "Zac's Haunted House"
How to Create Suspense: A New Freakonomics Radio Episode. [MUSIC: Danielle French, “Harsh Reality” (from Drive)] Harlan COBEN: Chapter One.

“The stranger didn’t shatter Adam’s world all at once. That was what Adam Price would tell himself later, but that was a lie. Adam somehow knew right away, right from the very first sentence, that the life he had known as a content, suburban, married father of two was gone forever. It was a simple sentence on the face of it.
Songs in the Key of Zzz: The History of Sleep Music. The idea makes a certain, if audacious, kind of sense.

The eye-swivels of REM don't tell us anything about what the brain thinks it sees; they go only up, down, and side to side, like a robotic appendage—directional but senseless. But the vibrations of the inner ear, theoretically, could be an entirely different matter: If the nerve endings were found to fire in response to specific, dreamed sounds—the bark of a dog, say, or the tolling of church bells—then each of those sounds could leave a fingerprint in the form of frequency, wavelength, and amplitude. To test his theory, Hayman took his custom-fit sensors—pressure-strain gauges that were inserted into the inner ear, which created encephalograph readings of MEMA phenomena—and outfitted them with microscopic microphones. The goal was to eavesdrop on the dream, essentially—as though Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation were to meet Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Someone just uploaded their complete collection of Kmart in-store background music. Attention, Kmart shoppers: here's one for the oddity file.

Mark Davis worked behind the Service Desk at the Naperville, IL Kmart in the late '80s and early '90s. Every month, corporate office issued a cassette to be played over the store speaker system — canned elevator-type music with advertisements seeded every few tracks. Around 1991, the muzak was replaced with mainstream hits, and the following year, new tapes began arriving weekly.

The cassettes were supposed to be thrown away, but Davis dutifully slipped each tape into his apron pocket to save for posterity. He collected this strange discount department store ephemera until 1993, when background music began being piped in via satellite service. Nearly 20 years on, Davis has digitized his whole collection, 56 cassettes in all, and just recently, made the recordings available at archive.org accompanied by some more background on this bizarre treasure trove.

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Discogs Turns Record Collectors’ Obsessions Into Big Business. Photo BEAVERTON, Ore. — In the beginning, Kevin Lewandowski just wanted a way to keep track of his techno records.

Now, 15 years later, the free website he set up for that purpose, Discogs.com, has become a vital resource for record collectors and the music industry, with a sprawling database of more than 6.5 million releases. And with an online marketplace through which nearly $100 million in records will be sold this year, Discogs has carved out a valuable niche in a market dominated by companies like Amazon and eBay. Borrowing from Wikipedia’s model of user-generated content, Discogs has built one of the most exhaustive collections of discographical information in the world, with historical data cataloged by thousands of volunteer editors in extreme detail.